SIG Webinars

IATEFL has 16 Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which aim to give teachers professional development opportunities including the chance to share knowledge and best practices in specific areas of English Language Teaching. As part of their activities, many of our SIGs hold their own webinars. Below, you can find a full list of upcoming SIG related webinars. These webinars are free of charge, open to both members and non-members of IATEFL and no pre-registration is required. Please check back on a regular basis as webinars are always being added.

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David Little - 'Learner Autonomy and the educational inclusion of primary pupils from immigrant families'

This webinar will describe an approach to the educational inclusion of immigrant pupils that exploits and further develops their capacity for autonomous behaviour. Developed by Scoil Bhríde (Cailíní), a primary school in one of Dublin’s western suburbs, the approach recognises that like all five-year-olds, those from immigrant homes are not blank slates; when they start school they already know a great deal about how the world works in their immediate context. This knowledge is the soil in which the seeds of curriculum content must be planted, but it has been acquired in a language that is not a version of the language of schooling. For this reason, Scoil Bhríde encourages immigrant pupils to use their home languages to support their learning in the classroom; at the same time, it draws on whatever languages are present in the classroom to develop all pupils’ language awareness. Besides producing high levels of literate proficiency in English, Irish (the second language of the curriculum), French (in the last two primary grades), and (for immigrant pupils) home languages, the approach generates unusually high levels of motivation to learn new languages. Another significant outcome of the approach is that from an early age pupils begin to exhibit autonomous learning behaviour as they pursue their growing interest in languages. My presentation will be illustrated by examples of pupils’ written work, and I shall relate what I have to say to the discussion that surrounds learner autonomy in L2 classrooms.

Bio

David Little retired in 2008 as Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. His principal research interests are the theory and practice of learner autonomy in language education, the exploitation of linguistic diversity in schools and classrooms, and the application of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages to the design of L2 curricula, teaching and assessment. Language Learner Autonomy: A Guide for Teachers, Teacher Educators and Researchers, the book he is currently completing with Leni Dam and Lienhard Legenhausen, will be published in due course by Multilingual Matters.

Youtube is a vast source of subtitled spoken English ranging from general to business to ESP, and it has long been an extremely valuable source of authentic video in the business English classroom. Moreover, as technology develops, there appear new ways of using this resource for language learning, and so its pedagogic value keeps growing. In particular, recently there have started to appear tools that, to a certain extent, allow to access Youtube as a corpus, i.e. find examples of use of specific lexical expressions and grammar. In this workshop I will overview some of these tools and then look more closely at http://tubequizard.com, a free corpus tool and quiz maker. We will look at a variety of classroom activities and teaching techniques that this technology has made possible, concentrating on two areas:(1) exploring lexis, grammar and discourse in business-related and specialist channels,and(2) finding, analyzing and exploiting subtitled authentic models in the business Englishclassroom.

Olya Sergeeva is a Delta qualified business English trainer based in St. Petersburg, Russia. She works as a curriculum owner at EPAM Systems, a multinational provider of software product development services, where she creates and delivers business English courses and oversees professional development of a team of business English trainers. Her professional interests lie in creating ELT materials informed by research into language acquisition, skills development and corpora. She blogs and shares teaching materials at http://eltgeek.wordpress.com.

Emotions are omnipresent in our daily lives, and teaching and learning are no exception. Two key characteristics of emotions are their highly subjective nature and their interaction with and mediation by learners’ and teachers’ diverse contexts. These features pose certain challenges to researchers of emotions generally and also within ELT specifically. Narratives in the form of diaries/journals and interviews have often been the most widely employed tools for collecting data on learners’ and teachers’ emotions. In this webinar, I will focus on scenario-based questionnaires and their use in research into emotions. I will describe an emotion-regulation questionnaire which we developed for foreign/second language learners and highlight the need for designing questionnaires which are contextualised and describe specific classroom situations.

Bio

Christina Gkonou is Lecturer in TESOL and MA TESOL Programme Leader at the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, UK. She convenes postgraduate modules on teacher training and education, and the psychology of language learning and teaching. Her main research interests are in all areas of the psychology of learners and teachers, but more specifically in language anxiety and emotions, teacher identity and agency, and emotion-regulation strategies for language learning. She is the co-editor of New Directions in Language Learning Psychology (2016) and New Insights into Language Anxiety: Theory, Research and Educational Implications (forthcoming), and co-author of theMYE (Managing Your Emotions) Questionnaire. Christina is also Development Officer for IATEFL ReSIG.

Celebrating the SIGs Pearl anniversary, this web conference will feature 30 speakers, each giving 30 minute presentations and will cover a range of topics including early years, primary and secondary education. More details to follow shortly!

For more information about the SIGs, please click here or go to the "Special Interests" tab of the IATEFL website.